


Long, Lonely Tides

by MediocreCoelacanth



Category: Supernatural
Genre: brief mention of canon character death at the end, it literally doesn't come up until the very last line or two of the fic, this is rated t for that one whole swear word, what a scandal i know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:49:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28804590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MediocreCoelacanth/pseuds/MediocreCoelacanth
Summary: A mood piece of sorts reflecting on Mary Winchester as she was vs how she is gradually remembered... or something like that. Originally intended as a multi-chapter affair, ended up being a short stand-alone read. The title comes from the song "Unchained Melody."





	Long, Lonely Tides

There is a point where Dean is about two years old when he has his first nightmare. He wakes to find a dark, shapeless sort of creature- all teeth and leering eyes- stalking him from the foot of his bed. When Mary is jolted out of a light, dreamless sleep in the small hours of the morning by her child’s cries of distress, she reacts in the way any young, first time mother would. Or, she reacts in the way any young, first time mother would if they had been raised in a family that, going back and back for generations innumerable, hunted things that crept, that killed in the night. _Not my baby, you bastard._  
  
She enters Dean’s room at something approaching a full on run, slamming open his bedroom door, the sawed off shotgun in her hand already loaded and cocked. Her heart is hammering; it's beating so fast that it feels like it's crawling up her throat and into the back of her mouth. It feels like she's going to puke. _Dean, Dean, Dean._  
  
Dean looks up. He sees, silhouetted in the hallway light coming in through his open bedroom door, a disheveled, angry looking person bearing down on him with a gun. He starts crying harder. Huge, wracking sobs as he stares up at this foreign creature. He wants his mom. It's a plea that squeezes out in the breaths between tears, ‘Mom. Mom. Mom.’  
  
Mary starts crying as well because what she has found is just... a normal bedroom. Her whole body begins to shake. At the memory of what she had feared was happening. At the thought of what she might have done. At the realization that maybe she never will be able to escape from that life, no matter how hard she tries to leave it all behind her. Placing the gun down by the door (the habit of training ensures that she does so safely. That even when her mind is somewhere else, Mary automatically uncocks her firearm, engages the safety before setting it aside), she makes her way over to Dean’s bed. She gathers him up in her arms and smooths his hair and presses tiny kisses into the crown of his head as he buries his tear streaked little face in her night shirt. She doesn't know what to say, but the words ‘It’s okay. It’s alright. Nothing was there. It was all just a bad dream. It’s okay. It’s alright,’ still manage to make their way into the still night air around them in an endless stream. It had only been a shadow, the shape of toddler-safe toy trucks distorted by darkness and by sleep. It had only ever been a shadow. There was no monster. Not this time. Maybe not ever.  
  
John arrives a few minutes later, having woken up enough to realize that something was amiss. He looks at the shotgun propped up against the inside wall of their two-year-old's bedroom. He looks at Mary holding Dean close while they both cry. He doesn't bother asking if everything is okay because that would be the wrong question _to_ ask. At least in the moment. He figures finding out the details can probably wait until morning. Instead, he goes and gets Dean a cup of water from the kitchen and then sits down on the little twin sized bed with his wife and son.  
  
Neither John nor Mary mention the incident again, even jokingly. Dean, at only two years old, doesn't remember that it happened. 

Acknowledged or not, the incident definitely plays a role in the fact that, only a month later, Mary finally stops sleeping with her old shotgun beneath her side of the bed. It isn't an easy transition to make and there are often nights where Mary finds herself waking in the grip of a vague, imprecise anxiety. On these nights, she slips out of bed and walks quietly through the house in the creeping twilight darkness. Aimless, pacing, she moves down the stairs to the kitchen and gazes out at the streetlights, at the cars parked in driveways and along the roadside, at the way the blades of grass turn silver when they catch the moonlight. Sometimes, she fills a glass at the sink just to listen to the sound of the water flowing from the tap, to watch the way it refracts light into the bottom of the sink. Sometimes, if John hadn't already washed them all before they went to bed for the evening, Mary will wash dishes, lining them up as quietly as possible in the drying rack.  
  
Or she might find herself in the living room, sitting on their second hand couch- the one that they had purchased almost on an impulse from a for sale notice in the paper because John didn't have a couch and Mary hadn't liked her couch enough to want to move it into their new home. She never bothers to turn on the television. Instead, Mary watches the blank, dark surface of the dead screen as it reflects what little light that straggles in through the curtained living room windows. She runs her hand over the couch fabric and lets the silence soak in through her skin.  
  
Often, Mary wanders into Dean’s bedroom. To make sure that he's sleeping okay. To reassure herself that he's still there. She walks a circuit around his room, picking up abandoned toys and returning them to their proper storage, straightening the curtains over the window. When she's finished her rounds to her satisfaction, Mary will sit on the edge of Dean’s twin sized bed, careful to leave enough space between them so that she doesn't wake him, and simply watches him. Breathe in. Breathe out.  
  
There are times when, during Mary’s nighttime excursions, that Dean does wake up- restless in the manner of young children- and Mary will walk him to the bathroom. Mary will scoop him up into a hug and then tuck his bed sheets back around his little body. She'll run her fingers through his short hair, still so baby-fine, and smooth out any little tangles. And Mary will sing to Dean. Not lullabies, of course, because Mary never learned them. She hadn't grown up in that kind of family. But she sings Dean "Stairway to Heaven" and "Dust in the Wind" and "Hey, Jude" and "Mrs. Brown, you’ve got a Lovely Daughter" but with the words changed out for ‘you’ve got a lovely son’ and they work just as well as any rendition of the Mockingbird song or “Rock-a-Bye, baby.” Maybe better, even, because the words will stick with Dean long after these restless nights in a way that children's rhymes never would. Because, in the hushed space of this time together, they remind Mary of normal things- of driving with John to the movies or going to concerts or just spending time with friends, sitting on the porch steps, chatting as if there had never been another time in all the world except the one they were inhabiting right in that moment.  
  
There were even nights when, upon waking, unable to return to sleep, Mary would stay in bed and listen to the sound of John breathing, slow and relaxed. Watch the way his face looked as he lay dreaming. If those quiet moments of laying beside John, not going anywhere, not doing anything, could last forever, Mary thinks that she would have been satisfied just with that. 

Even after certain other elements of her old lifestyle have been quietly packed away, Mary still exercises borderline religiously. Weight sets, sit ups, push ups- John laughs over the fact that, of the two of them, Mary is fitter. He jokes about having used up all of his energy for exercising back when he was with the marines. Mary, stretching to prepare for an early morning run, laughs along with him.  
  
Although John occasionally exercises with her, despite his jokes, Mary mostly prefers to exercise alone. As much as Mary loves the family she has been building together with John, she likes having this space to herself. The only consistent exception to this trend are evening jogs: no matter the time of year or the temperature, Mary bundles up Dean and puts him in his stroller and sets off. It started off out of necessity- it allowed Mary to _move_ , to get out of the house while John was away at work, without finding someone to look after the baby. Now, it's become something of a ritual, a special time just for Dean and Mary. The stroller Mary had started out using- a middle of the road model that, like its contemporaries, was never designed with more than a sedate walking speed in mind- has been replaced with a custom stroller that Bobby Singer helped them rig up. They have favorite routes to take. The neighbors smile when they see them and wave and say things like “there go Mary and Dean, right on schedule” or “I think I saw Mary go by, even in this weather.”

John has his own ways of spending time with Dean. It starts out with plastic trucks and matchbox cars. Dean rolls the pretend vehicles back and forth on the floor while John helps him supply engine noises and lists of trivia about engine sizes and hauling capacity and maximum speeds. The information is, maybe, a bit beyond the scope of a toddler’s understanding, but Dean giggles and rolls the race cars and trucks around and he looks at John like his dad invented the very concept of cars. John absolutely thrives from it. He wouldn't want their relationship to be any other way. Mary just laughs at him for it, teasingly, but he understands that she feels the same.  
  
Once Dean starts to become more mobile and develop slightly more comprehensive motor skills, John starts playing catch with him. At first, it starts out with rolling John’s old baseball back and forth across the living room carpet. Then one day, John drives him and Mary out to the closest store that sells toys so that they can pick out a ball. Something firm enough for throwing but pliable enough to help small hands grip it and soft enough that it won't hurt if Dean accidentally gets hit. It's a present for Dean’s third birthday. They spend the entire evening tossing the ball back and forth. Dean misses every catch and John has to stand within two feet of the boy in order for any of his throws to reach him but father and son are both smiling, grinning from ear to ear, when Mary heads out for her evening jog.  
  
Frequently, in moments when John and Mary are enjoying a quiet evening at home as a family, when the tv is buzzing in the background, a low drone as Mary prepares dinner or sorts through mail, John likes to think aloud about future projects he’ll take up with Dean. He muses about how- when Dean is older, of course- they can build a soap box derby car together and enter it in that one local race the Boy Scouts host every year. He ponders what position Dean will play on the little league baseball team once he's old enough to join. (He amends this a bit when Mary points out that Dean might not want to play baseball- maybe he’ll go out for track or the football team or play ultimate frisbee. “All right,” John says. “I wonder what position Dean will end up playing in baseball or football or whatever sport he picks That is Not Ultimate Frisbee.”) He talks through scenarios where he and Dean will work on fixing cars together in the garage- about how they’ll find a classic model that's been left for junk and rebuild it together and how that can be Dean’s first car. Something that he can be proud of.

When they find out that they have another baby on the way, Mary and John go back and forth on whether to convert the guest room for the baby or have it share a room with Dean. John thinks that it will be important for their kids to spend time together and that, as the big brother, Dean should be around to look out for his little sibling. Mary points out that babies wake up a lot and Dean shouldn't have to deal with a crying baby at strange hours in the night given that he’ll only be four when the baby arrives. She adds in that the kids can spend lots of time together without sleeping in the same room, that she wants both of their children to have plenty of space to be themselves. Mary had always wished, growing up, that she had had more space to _herself_ and besides, she was certain that no distance in the world would prevent Dean from looking after his little brother or sister.  
  
The next step or the next step after Jon carries up Dean’s old crib from the basement and they both sort through hand-me-down baby blankets and Mary cleans out the old baby bottles while John sets up a separate little drying rack for them on the counter top... The next step that causes problems is picking out a color to paint the baby's room.  
  
They wait until the doctor tells them the baby's gender, pointing out indistinct little smudges on an ultrasound, and then John and Mary drive out to the local home improvement store to pick out paint. They spend almost an hour there and return with ten different paint swatches a piece. Neither of them can agree on a single color. In the end, the decision comes down to Dean’s choice; after an evening of debating colors and whittling down the options to just six, Mary and John line up the paint swatches in front of Dean and ask him to pick one. John makes a show of play-sulking when Dean taps on one of Mary's choices. Mary scoops Dean up with an exaggerated whoop of glee and swings him around, showering him with little smooches. She teases John for days after about how Dean obviously inherited his good taste from her, how he’ll grow up to become a successful designer for expensive houses. John scowls and _humphs_ about it without, of course, actually being upset. On another evening, later on, John jokingly asks how Mary will handle running in the evenings with two babies (once she's up to running again)- whether she’ll push two strollers side by side or stack them both in the one stroller. Mary replies that John will just have to upgrade the stroller that they already have to accommodate both children. She laughs and tells him that if he can handle upgrading cars then surely he can manage adding an extra seat to a stroller. 

The first commercially available jogging stroller becomes available in stores sometime in ‘84. John will be out hunting. Dean and his new little brother will be staying with their paternal grandparents who sigh and tut over how much John has changed since the fire. Mary will have been dead for almost a year.

**Author's Note:**

> my first fic posted to Ao3! Wow... and it's for a series that I haven't really actively followed in years. But that's just how the brain works sometimes, right? You're driving to work and then somehow you've started humming "Unchained Melody" and are thinking about how you should totally just for fun write a fic about interpersonal relationships in spn and how the relationships themselves as well as the characters perception of them alter over time... Or whatever.  
> If you took the time to read this uhhhh thanks! Take care! ;-)


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